references to binary opposition in Pynchon's novels

[Paul Mackin]

I think this discussion has probably gone on long enough. In our last go
around we were at least in the same language group. I would have liked
to convince you, or anyone, that the subject passage has "problems" but
that was not to be. 

One last thing. I follow John Searle with regard to similarities between
the computer and the human mind. They are completely unlike.  The
computer example I used was merely to illustrate how an "organism" at
it's lowest level of organization can be extremely simple and at its
higher levels extremely complex. There is nothing more complex than
animal behavior.



On Mon, 2004-11-08 at 07:01, jbor wrote:
> [...] But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something,
> Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico,
> survive anyplace in between . Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, he
> imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements. Some
> are always in bright excitation, others darkly inhibited. The contours,
> bright and dark, keep changing. But each point is allowed only the two
> states: waking or sleep. One or zero. "Summation," "transition,"
> "irradiation," "concentration ," "reciprocal induction" -- all Pavlovian
> brain-mechanics - assumes the presence of these bi-stable points. But to
> Mexico belongs the domain *between* zero and one -- the middle Pointsman has
> excluded from his persuasion -- the probabilities. [...] (_GR_, p. 55)
> 
> >> however, Pynchon's parody of a behaviourist scientist of the
> >> 1940s in the shape of Pointsman is an accurate one.
> > 
> > Even as a parody, the quoted passage can't be described as "accurate."
> > It's an impossible portrayal of even a zany pavlovian or behaviorist.
> > The ones and zeros and the calling up of Pavlov's on and off switches on
> > the cortex couldn't in sensible way put P at odds with Roger and his
> > probability. Yet there differences were supposed to be what the passage
> > is about. Even Pointsman couldn't possibly think that just because an
> > all or nothing principle is a work at a lower level that such uniformity
> > would prevail at the higher (behavioral) level.
> 
> I'll take neuroscientific understanding in the 1940s for 50 thanks Regis.
> Seriously, the point of the passage is that Pointsman, a behaviourist,
> following Pavlov, "imagine[s]" the brain and all its functioning as a
> "mosaic", or constantly-changing pattern, of tiny on-off light switches.
> It's this mechanistic analogy which underpins his work and his view of human
> psychology, and it's based on the principle that if you were able to
> eliminate completely all extraneous variables then behaviour (the
> stimulus-response relationship) could be predicted (and manipulated) with
> 100% certainty. That's why Skinner put his pigeons (and his infant daughter)
> in sensory deprivation boxes -- it's why Pointsman administers Slothrop with
> Sodium Amytal at St Veronica's.
> 
> Mexico is a statistician, and his probability analyses raise the possibility
> that Pavlov was wrong (he was), that brain functioning at the neuron level
> *in terms of transmission* -- of data or energy or whatever -- might not be
> "like" an on-off light switch after all, but more like a dimmer switch, or
> even a timer switch; i.e. that there are gradations, or levels of
> functioning (speed, intensity, duration, delay), between the hard and fast
> limits of zero (off) and one (on). The excluded middle. The troubling thing
> in all this for Pointsman is that once the mechanistic analogy starts to
> fall apart -- inferring back, from Mexico's statistical collations of
> aberrant behaviour to brain functioning ("mind") -- so does everything he
> has worked for and had faith in.
> 
> You keep deferring to the analogy of the human mind as a computer. But it's
> actually not an apt analogy at all. That's the point. However, it *is*
> precisely where behaviourism ultimately led (cf. Skinner: "The real question
> is not whether machines think but whether men do."), it's the model of
> intelligence upon which cybernetics and computing is based, and it's
> precisely the idea which Pynchon has contested throughout his work. It's
> also precisely the idea which Chomsky was able to debunk in his review of
> Skinner's _Verbal Behavior_ back in 1959, which is where that later
> interview comment of his comes in (Chomsky: "As soon as questions of will or
> decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.").
> Not that Chomsky's "innatism" came any closer to the mark in terms of
> language acquisition, but what he did show was that behaviourism was
> off-beam. He demonstrated its fallibility, in other words.
> 
> Hope this helps.
> 
> best
> 
> > That he could do without
> > statistics. That would be like saying that just because a computer bit
> > can only register on and off the only words storable in a computer can
> > be on and off.  Why is any of this so hard to acknowledge? It's nothing
> > any of us did. It's something Pynchon did. His cleverness is not
> > invincible.   
>